Before DOOM, id Software was actually working on DOOM 4, which as you may know, eventually got canned by publisher Bethesda in the middle of development. And according to Bethesda's Vice President in Marketing and Public Relation, Pete Hines, the decision was the right one, as the game simply wasn't shaping up.

With Doom it was a tipping point that we reached where we looked at it and said, ‘This game is not hitting the marks it needs to hit.’ And it wasn’t just Bethesda, it was id coming to us and saying, "It’s not that it’s not a good game or an okay game, but it’s just not Doom. It’s veered from the things that we think Doom should be about." And again, it’s not like we were happy about it! We essentially cancelled a game. That’s what we did. We cancelled a thing that people had spent a long time working on and we’d spent a lot of money to get to that point and then we cancelled it and basically started over. Which is never easy to do. But it was because we believed in and agreed with the notion of: if this is going to be a success, if it’s going to be worth all this time and effort, then it has to be the right thing, executed the right way.